/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I’m becoming a little annoyed with Emacs now. While it’s been pretty ok to use on a day-to-day basis for notes and other text chores, getting down and actually coding with it is quite, at least to me, annoying. My biggest problem is auto-indent. I can’t seem to shut this feature off to save my life, and it drives me insane. It seems to vary depending on the mode I’m in (php, python, etc), and the modes seem to override the settings in my .emacs file. While I do enjoy planner mode, the coding side of Emacs is basically annoying the heck out of me right now, and with what I’m working on, I’m thinking an IDE is going to suit me better in the long run. I may find the exact formula to change the behavior, but lately I’m not all that interested in that, rather than finding what’s going to be the most comfortable setup for me.

I’ve decided to go the Linux in a VM route on my laptop. Yes, I know, bad geek, but I’m willing to take the loss of geek points. My main reasons for switching to this setup is battery life and heat. I know I could spend hours trying to get things tweaked just right, but even so it seems that Vista does a bit of a better job as far as these two categories go. My laptop has enough power that running a VM isn’t going to be a big deal, especially when I can just SSH into my desktop and access just about everything there.

This also means I may post some Windows tips/tricks since I’m going to try to keep this thing running in top shape. I may also review some utilities I’m using as well. While I do prefer Linux, I’m also a fan of using what gets the job done.

Some of you may have heard about the goings-on surrounding Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, and how he was convicted of killing his wife. Most recently, he lead police to her body in an effort to get his sentence reduced. An interesting idea came up on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site that sparked a lot of controversy. Exhibit A: Brainstorm Idea #10930. The summary is that the submitter things sending a laptop to Reiser while in jail would give him a chance to contribute to society. Ignoring the fact that the laptop would never see it’s intended recipient, some of the comments got rather interesting. Eldmannen, the originator of the post, sees Hans as a ‘victim’ in all of this and has some rather ludicrous thoughts.

There’s this gem:

mtrausch,
Whatever, it was just one kill. Big deal. Others have killed way more. George W Bush is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Also if he commit a crime, he should be locked up so he is no harm to society. But he should still be allowed participate and contribute to society so that he can become a good and productive citizen.
Plus, she deserved it. She cheated with Sean Sturgeon, embezzled money from his company, and was an irresponsible mother who abused illegal substances such as ecstasy.
Let this be a lesson to all; avoid post-order mail brides.

chipbennett,
It is much better to let him be a productive citizen of society that contributes to society, than have him locked up and do nothing, just waste tax money.

neon,
It is not like he killed Gandhi, he just killed his wife.
Perhaps other people can work on it too, but Hans is the genius who designed it, he can make bring the best to it.

And this is the comment that spurred me to post this:

Endperform,
She was a irresponsible mother abused illegal substances such as ecstasy, putter her kids at risk and who dated Sean Sturgeon a dangerous serial-killer who have admitted to killing 8 people and leaving a ninth for dead.
* http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser

I cant imagine the tremendous stress and abuse that poor Hans must have endured. :(
Driving an kind and peaceful man into such an act. :(

“He took someone else’s life and should have to pay for his crimes.”
The guy is paying for his crime. He is doing time.
But he should be given an laptop so that he can be a productive citizen and contribute to the society.

Poor Hans? The guy KILLED HIS WIFE. Eldmannen seems to think Hans is the victim in this, and that his wife drove him to murder her. If you’re having problems with your significant other, there are ways to fix or defuse the situation. If he was really that ’stressed’, he should have separated from her, or better yet, divorced her completely. The fact remains that he killed his wife. We don’t know the exact surroundings of the murder, but to say in no uncertain terms that she deserved to die is just completely insane.

Jon posted an interesting entry concerning KDE3 vs KDE4, and I was all geared up to post a comment to it, but I figured I would go ahead and share my thoughts here, since I had been pondering writing about this topic to begin with. He mentioned a couple of points that I’d like to weigh in on myself. I’ve summarized the points since I haven’t had a chance to ask if I could repost portions of his blog here.

I disagree with the thought that KDE3 is only for power users. I’ve sat quite a few people in front of a KDE3 setup who were totally used to Windows and they didn’t have any issues getting things done. In one case, one person actually liked the fact that settings were at his fingertips and not buried behind various shields. The fact that KDE4 is trying to simplify things doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to appeal to everyone. In fact, some may view this as going along the lines of the Gnome project. My biggest beef with Gnome is the whole GConf setup, and the fact that I have to dig through a special editor to customize some settings. I shouldn’t need to go into a registry-like setup to tweak things. KDE3 exposes these things in via the system settings and various configuration settings, where they should be.

KDE3 was, and still is, a perfectly good desktop for home users. For most people, they may not get into all of the settings, only accessing what they need to. The settings themselves are organized well enough that most wouldn’t need that much hand-holding (if any) to get around things. For some reason, the thought that KDE3 was for power users only just kinda bugs me a bit, especially after seeing quite a few new users take to it nicely.

With that said, let’s turn to KDE4. I’ve tried it, and wasn’t too keen on it at the time. I may give it another shot when 4.1 final is released, but I’m still not sold on it yet. To me, it seems like they focused on the “ooo, pretty” aspect of the desktop and went from there. I wouldn’t call KDE3 vs. KDE4 over just yet. It’s going to take some time before people completely migrate over, myself included.

So, I’m closing in on the end of my first week with Emacs. So far, things are going about as I expected them to be. I have started my own cheatsheet (which I may publish later), and I’ve installed Planner, which is a really great mode for organizing. It depends on a couple of other things, but once installed, it works well. I’m finding that it’s a nice tool as far as work goes when it comes to organization. I haven’t done much real coding in Emacs yet, simply because I’m still looking for a project to do. Coding at work has been slow because I haven’t had time to work on the internal web applications and there hasn’t been an opportunity for a cool bash script lately.

So, what do I have on my list of things to learn?

- Keybindings. This is going to take a while, but once I learn them then I’ll be in good shape

- .emacs. I’m sure there are some settings that some would see as essential. I’ll share mine in an upcoming post.

As far as projects go, I think I might start taking a look around at the open source projects out there and see if there’s something I can do to start getting involved. I think I’ll also work on setting up local source control on this machine to make managing things easier